Year-end musings

Quite frankly - I'm glad to see this year come to a close. It's not been an easy one - but it has been heeeeeyuuuuge on the personal growth front. In an attempt to get my head around stuff, here are some things that have happened or I have learned in the past year:

• I lost my best friend-sister-cousin to cancer


• I was able to really step up for her when she was sick. (I am extremely grateful for the generosity and caring from my employers during that time.)


• The grieving process is lot like the Grand Canyon. You can't really appreciate the imensity, scope, and vastness of it until your standing in front of it.


• I lost a bunch of weight. No, this was not stress-related. This was a very conscious, present process.


• I am redefining who I am and my place in the world and chagrined to face my own judgements about fat and thin.


• I am continuing to find my own voice in my artwork and discovered that I just may actually have some talent.


• Nature - and life in general - can be messy, smelly, gorey, ugly, brutal, and in your face. And - it's not personal!


• For the most part I actually like my job.


• Although I started out this year a bit afraid of him, I think I understand Coyote a little better than before.


• Tatiana rocks!


• Life really is what happens when your busy making other plans.


• Everything is always changing.


• Skeletons aren't as scary as they used to be - especially when teaching you to surf.


• It's really OK to f-ck up. Really. It's OK.


• It is quite possible that rules really were made to be broken. Especially the ones in your head.


• These last two are intrinsically connected.


• Nothing is ever all good or all bad. Nothings is ever written in stone. There are no absolutes.


• Sometimes it's really best to say nothing at all.

Holiday Card 2008

Holiday greetings!

As they say, everything is always changing, and we are announcing a change to the way we’ll be sharing our annual holiday card. In an effort to conserve both personal and global resources, this is the last year we'll be sending out paper, hard-copy Sloane-Ochoa original holiday cards.

But we’re not going away! We still want to share our original creations and best wishes with folks so, starting in 2009, we will be sending our holiday card via email and also posting it for viewing online.

That gives you a whole year to make sure we have your email address! You can send it to us at:
200wordsForSnow@gmail.com.

Reducing our footprint, one step at a time!

Another Sloane~Ochoa Original
© 2008

Celebrating Bluto

Jon Carroll, one of my favorite S.F. Chronicle columnists, often gives his readers a warning before launching into a "cat column". Apparently, some of his readers dislike his accountings of feline antics. I'm not one of them--I love his cat columns--but I'm going to take a page from his notebook and give warning here and now. Warning--this is a cat posting. Moreover, this is a feral cat posting--and it's not short. Does it get any better than that?

As I've previously mentioned, I have been both blessed and cursed to share my life with a group of feral cats. I've made a commitment to each of them--they've each been spayed or neutered, microchipped, immunized, and given daily food and water--and they have returned the favor by gracing us with a peek into their different personalities and social structure.

When Bluto first arrived on the scene in May, 2001, he was what my records describe as a "Big Nasty Orange Tom". We called him Bluto because all the other cats were afraid of him. He fought with the other cats and, when I managed to trap him, he was hateful, striking at me twice through the trap. After his release Bluto gradually mellowed and had become a regular fixture by the time Taran joined the group in June of 2002. It didn't take long for Taran and Bluto to bond, often sleeping curled up together and grooming each other. By July of that year Bluto was a sweet, albeit shy, marshmallow of cat, wholly dedicated to his feral feline family. Where Taran had assumed the more paternal, leadership role, Bluto was the nurturing, snuggling maternal presence of the group. Tortilina is the mighty huntress, keeping the yard free of rats and the only member of our clan who has kept her svelte figure. Every member of the clan looks after Mama Kitty, who has always had breathing issues and they all treat her with incredible affection and tenderness. Then there is Cinder Kitty who I call our Outrider. She comes and goes as she pleases, drifting in and out of the group, and is another story for another day.

Caring for feral cats is not easy. Crazy cat lady euphemisms aside, it has been a great lesson in love and surrender and all the different ways those can both be defined. I will never be able to touch them--they will not stand for that. Occasionally someone will get close enough to sniff my hand, but I can only guess I smell unpleasant to the feral feline nose because they will recoil and move away as quickly as possible. I may feed them, but short of that initial trapping, any kind of medical attention is virtually impossible. These guys ain't gonna fall for the same trick twice and, even if I did manage to trap them again, in most cases the extreme stress involved in a trip to the vet, and the difficulty and danger of handling and treating an essentially wild animal rules this out. It's not unlike those wildlife photographers who document events, but do not become involved as life and death works itself out in front of them. The biggest difference--I have made a lifetime commitment to these cats, whatever the scope of their lifetime might mean.

So I get to watch from a very privileged, yet distant place, while these guys move through their lives. We saw Bluto's health declining. He was old by feral standards. He had become increasingly hard of hearing and we were careful not to startle him when we could tell he didn't hear us coming. He spent almost all his time in our yard so we hoped he would be safe. Often the pupils of his eyes were unequal, one being significantly more dilated than the other. His coat, once dense and thick, started to look as if he was molting. Then one of his eyes became severely infected. Critics might say it was unfair to let him suffer, but I still believe a trip to the vet would have made him suffer more--and it would have been impossible to give him any kind of ongoing treatment. So we watched as the infection grew worse and sent him healing thoughts and love as often as possible, but always from a distance.

Bluto has been missing for well over a week now and we know in our hearts that he is gone. I fear that his end was not pleasant and I hope that our love and care made some difference in the overall quality of his life while he was here. His feline family called for him for several days, but that has tapered off. As I look back I marvel over the transformation his personality underwent and what an integral part of his feline family he became--the cat who once fought with everyone.

We all miss his warm, loving, hunk of a presence in our back yard. We miss how he and Taran would curl up together on the front porch, both impossibly fitting on the one chair. We miss his constancy and his shy, sweet, unassuming self.

Crow Irony

Yes... more about Crow. Among other things, I like the duality of crow--the light and dark, yin and yang, and the reminder that nothing is ever all "bad" or all "good". And face it. I just plain like crows.

This piece is small, 6X6 on canvas board, acrylic, gesso, white opaque flakes, cheesecloth, and original pen and ink art.

It's my party...

Or in this case, it's my blog, and I'll post what I want to. I'm tired of waiting until I have a piece completed, photographed, or scanned, before posting here. The truth is, exploration in all forms, is what this space is about, so I've decided to share some new stuff. Because, as I mention in another post, I'm freakish about not using other people's proprietary images and content, and I'm also cheap, I use my own digital photography in my mixed media pieces. My holiday present to myself last year was my Canon S5 IS with a killer zoom.

In case it's not obvious, I'm also a bit freakish about animals and am both blessed and cursed to share my life with, among others, five feral cats. Make no mistake, these guys are truly feral, and we can't get too close to them, but I discovered recently that my zoom can.

Here's some backyard wildlife photography, in order of appearance, Tortilina and Mama Kitty above, Cinder Kitty directly below, and Taran in close up at bottom.

We have the technology...

At long last - here is Raven. This piece measures 24X30 and was completed in 2007. Finding a way to effectively show this piece online has been challenging so my thanks go out to Craig at Luna's Memories, and his awesome scanner. You can click on the image to see it larger, although it still lacks a little something compared to the real thing.

First, the technical stuff. This piece incorporates acrylic paints, tissue paper, digital photography, and old topographic maps. All the images (with the exception of the topo maps) are original.

This piece is highly personal to me and the process of creating it was quite a journey on technical, artistic, and emotional levels.

• Because I'm not into stealing other people's imagery and violating copyright laws, and I'm inherently cheap, I decided I needed to create the components of this piece myself. I discovered that maybe I really can paint.


• Although I had previously only worked on pieces no larger than 9X12 I was being called, loudly, to go bigger with this piece. Purchasing the canvas and taking it out to my car was a true act of faith.


• This is the piece where I first heard my own artistic voice and was able to stay true to it while serving the muse and the magic of Raven.

Oh, and another act of courage -- sharing this very personal piece with the world.

Snake and the Rule Book

Yes, it's a recurring theme in my life -- see Breaking the Rules if you need any kind of history here. Or, if you want more information you can read Truth about my struggles creating this piece. I worked on this piece for a long time. As I mentioned, there were both logistical/mechanical challenges as well as emotional ones.

Here's the other part.

On May 19, just as I was almost finished with this piece, my cousin was diagnosed with very advanced lung cancer. Somehow I managed to grab some time in my art studio between doctor's appointments, the emergency room, ICU, and vigilant advocacy at the hospital. I finished this piece shortly before she died on June 6.

We were very close, saying we were cousins and sisters (although I began to fear people would take us literally and really wonder about our family.) I was "her person" holding her hand throughout her illness. You can see her memorial video on YouTube.

Pain and grief are still very fresh right now so I can't completely articulate this, but I know her passing and this piece are connected. Snake teaches me to transmute, shed my skin, and embrace the power of fire. It's no mistake, ironic as it may seem right now, that the woman is smiling on the burnt pages of the rule book.

OctoPop

No, it's not a blue frozen popsicle treat. My father turned 80 this past April and due to several unforeseen circumstances, I wasn't able to give him his birthday gift until recently. Obviously I couldn't post the picture of it until he had received the actual item, but here it is. Happy birthday Pop - you are officially an Octogenarian!
This piece is all about fun and reminder to me to lighten up once in a while. Not everything has to be deep, personal, and meaningful. Art is about expression, and there really is a lighter, goofy side to me. This is a mixture of digital artwork, using a photo I took of his dog Ruthie, textured papers, more words as visual elements, and lots of acrylic paint and medium.

Hippo Birdies to Bro

The subtitle of my blog is Explorations in art, love, and speechlessness. This post is about all three.

You can't know me for long without hearing about my brother. We survived childhood together, and in our family that's no small feat. To say we're close is an understatement but I often find it difficult to tell the people most important to me how much I love them. He's a multi-talented carpenter, artist, river rafter, musician and he just turned 50. You can see his ceramics at www.sloanearts.com. Aint he something?

I made this piece for my brother, in celebration of his half-century mark this time around. This 11 X 14, mixed-media collage piece has a matte finish. The vintage photos of the mountains and digitally altered topographic map are the San Gabriel mountains, specifically Icehouse Canyon. We grew up at the root of these mountains and I think they are part of our cell structure. The photo of the two of us was taken on my 17th birthday. Hey, we all looked like that back then! Spider walked into this piece of her own accord.

Digital disclaimer: this is a scan of the unframed piece and not only is the resolution pretty poor, but it loses something without the frame. I gave it to him before I could get an image of the framed piece. If I do I'll replace this image, but use your imagination in the meantime.

Lesser Known Artists and the Kindness of the Muse

When I took a hard right turn from pursuing visual art in college I landed on creative writing and earned a degree from San Francisco State. Memory is a funny thing, so I think my reflections now are very different from what was actually going on then. That being said, creative writing felt safer than art -- partly because I don't think I ever pictured myself as an actual working writer. I'm not sure I really gave fiction writing my full energies, but I did meet some incredibly gifted writers through that program, including my lifelong friend, Becky.

Poetry, on the other hand, was my strong point and there is one particular poem I wrote that, after all these years, I can still remember -- probably because it's very short. A poetry teacher took us all to the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (I'm not sure if that's even what it was called back then, but it was in an old building on Van Ness Street. If anyone knows the museum I'm talking about, please let me know) to see an exhibit by Lee Krasner -- an amazing abstract artist who suffered the distinction of being married to Jackson Pollock. In case you're wondering why Krasner's name is hotlinked here and Pollock's is not it's because Krasner spent her artistic career in Pollock's shadow and this is just my small way of paying tribute. If you want to know more about Jackson Pollock, use Google like everyone else...

The intent of the field trip was to use visual art as inspiration for poetry and the written word, but to me it was more about a holistic approach to art in general. Seeing those paintings was both inspiring for me and uncomfortable, but most importantly, left me feeling like I wanted to described that moment when art -- whatever genre you choose -- just works. When the muse is present and inhabits you. When the artist is the process, and the process is the artist, and every cell of your body is immersed, and when you're done it's like regaining consciousness.